What should really be done about gun violence in the US?

What is "gun violence?"

We could start by locking up violent offenders for lengthy periods of time instead of preaching rehabilitation and installing revolving doors on our prisons. We could lock up some of the violent felons we never even bother investigating for trying to fraudulently obtain firearms. We can train lawful citizens in the use of firearms to better protect our communities from violence. We can make concealed carry permits easily accessible and inexpensive for any lawful citizen who wants one. We can provide free or reduced cost training for lawful citizens who want to further increase both their safety and proficiently with their firearms. What won't work are more laws that hinder the ability of the common man to obtain, carry, and use firearms that will have absolutely no effect on the criminal element who, by definition, commit crimes.

If you mean violent crimes in which guns are used, then the answer is simple. We should do the same thing we do in violent crimes where knives are used. The same thing we do in violent crimes where bats are used; where cars are used; where fists are used.

That is to say, we should continue to do the wrong thing. It's no secret that America's justice system is horribly flawed. We have the highest rate of adult incarceration of any "1st world" country on the face of the Earth, and we simultaneously place among the top for violent crime rates among the same group.

Our prisons are overcrowded, forcing us to simultaneously let criminals out "early," and route other criminals to alternative punishment, or no punishment at all. Many Americans can watch a murder happen before their very eyes and their first thought is that we need to hold a piece of metal and/or plastic responsible, instead of the human being who did it.

This country needs a reformation of justice like guitars need strings. We need to teach personal accountability to our children, and enforce it strictly through adolescence and into adulthood. We need parents to take responsibility for their kids instead of blaming others when their kid screws up. We need to stop being a people who want to be rubbed down and told it's okay when it's obvious that we're headed to Hell in a hand-basket. We need to stop worrying about hurting our neighbors' feelings, and just speak the truth whether or not people want to hear it. We need to learn when to say enough is enough, and we need to have the balls to say it, and stick to our guns when we know it. We need to remember that honest two-way discussion will usually solve problems; but sometimes, violence really is the answer.

Those are some good first steps to reducing crime in this country. "Gun violence" will be reduced along with it.

The problem with the "mental health" solution is it will only get done by involving doctors and lawyers. Before you know it, a kid who's having a rough time at school because a bully keeps stealing his lunch money is going to be marked for depression and prevented from ever buying a gun as an adult.

Mental illness is not the reason our nation has a problem with crime. Our problem with crime is due, mostly, to our nation's focus on political correctness and our changing attitude toward personal accountability over the last fifty years. I'm 29 and even I can see that. Let's see how many THR members in their 50s or older agree with me. I'm guessing all of them.

BTW, I voted for the "Gun Control Czar" option. I didn't want it to be lonely, and none of the other options were any better.

Its not necessarily a "reactive" move because many violent offenders are released early from their sentences, only to go out and commit more crimes. By keeping them locked up, we are proactively keeping them from committing more crimes in our communities. The violent criminal tends to remain a violent criminal....why we release them into society and blindly hope otherwise often shocks me, espscially when we have prisons overcrowded with nonviolent offenders who have never shown signs of violence. Its not that we don't have the means or the room to do this, its that we grossly mismanage resources when it comes to corrections. Imagine the empty cells if we decided one day to release nonviolent drug offenders and white collar criminals from our prison systems. Then we could actually focus on locking up the true threats to public safety, without overly burdening the law-abiding citizen with more meaningless laws. Incarcerating violent offenders wouldn't be at all difficult, but it would take a complete revamping of our prison system as it now stands. We claim to be a civilized country, yet incarcerate per capita a greater percentage of our population than any other country. We've taken such a "tough on crime" stance we've lost focus of what crimes are truly deserving of a prison sentence myself, which has actually led us to the opposite extreme of being soft of crime by necessitating early releases, probation, parole, etc

I'd say any crime committed where the criminal is armed automatically adds 10 years to the sentence, cannot be plead down and the full sentence must be served, no early release. Make illegally using a firearm a severe enough penalty that the career violent criminal would not see the light of day as a free man and someone who has not crossed the road to using a firearm to commit a crime yet think twice before deciding to grab that gun.

Releasing violent offenders into society has proven to be bad, yet we as a country do it on a daily basis. I think focusing incarceration on those most prone to violence is indeed a great start. How does it make sense to release a 2 time convicted violent offender over a drug offender who had one gram over some arbitrary amount that triggered a mandatory minimum? Mandatory minimum sentences should be reserved ONLY for violent offenses. Keeping someone in jail for 5 grams of crack and who has behaved perfectly while in prison,and releasing a guy who beat his grandma to death with a baseball bat and has a prison disciplinary record a mile long doesn't make sense to me, yet you can find examples of such things happening. We've overwhelmed our prisons with people that really shouldn't be there, while releasing those that should *NOT* be back into society with startling regularity. Yet, we have those that insist on passing stupid laws making more and more average joes technically "criminals" which only adds to the burden on our corrections system while doing nothing to stop the behavior the law was meant to somehow address. Its madness, and its a never-ending cycle unless we vow to look at serious reforms. I think it is absolute madness the rate at which we lock people up in this country, particularly for nonviolent offenses.

Three step program. First step take tax away from permits. Second step make all states constitutional carry. Third step remove "gun" from gun violence and look at the real problem of violence.

It was amazing to watch Gary Indiana (once one of the murder capitols of the world) transform into what could only be described as a polite society when Indiana became a Shall Issue CCW state. Not only was there a dramatic drop in murder but all violent acts in general were effected. I lived five miles south of Gary at the time and avoided that city like the plague. When I had to go into Gary I went armed, no exceptions. It has changed much to the better because of the ability for the law abiding gun owners to carry their firearm.

In 2006 a drug addict (with a drug-related disability check $768 a month) was arrested for beating a couple to death with a baseball bat in their home; evidence brought to light in that case linked him to the stabbing death of a woman in a boarding house in 2004 (just one block from where I was living in 2004). Two drug dealers with connections to the Baltimore-NYC axis shot and killed two local drug dealers operating a "candle shop" one block from my wife's business office. Also locally two guys killed a disabled Iraq war vet with hammer and knife to steal his money and gun collection to buy/trade for drugs. And over in Scott County a group of druggies beat a "friend" to death with a rock and left her body in the woods. Reckless people likely to do violence are also likley to do drugs is my take away on that. People with a history of violence need to be put away from the rest of us.

Crimes like that do terrorize me: violent crimes by heartless people. The gun control crowd though would focus on the shooting deaths of the bunch, and call for the wrath of government on the heads of 65 to 80 million American gun owners. Apparently the non-gun violence is not on their radar.

There is more in common between gun violence offenders and non-gun violence offenders than there is between violent offenders and gun owners, and identfying violent offender characteristics would do more about violent crime prevention than a crusade to make guns illegal or make malum prohibitum criminals out of gun owners. Malum in se overt acts and actors need punishment. In my book, concentrating on the means rather than on the actor with bad motives is a form of voodoo criminology.

My home county (Sullivan County, Tennessee) death rate from drug overdose was listed in a recent newspaper article as 14 per 100,000 per year, about five times our typical homicide rate.* OD deaths in Hawkins County went down after a drug ring operating a fake pain clinic in Georgia was shut down by a joint task force operation DEA-ATF. Problems at the ER and in the news with bath salts abuse went down after legal sale of synthetic drugs at smoke shops and head shops was outlawed.

I supported the interdiction of hydrocodone smuggling from Georgia and Florida and I supported the campaign to shutdown the bath salts, K2, etc. synthetic drug traffick. Locally I do not see a lot of media reports of people getting twenty years for personal use quantities of drugs absent a connection to violent crime. Off the record I have heard from former-teenagers then in their twenties that local officers who caught them first time smoking pot made them throw it in the river and gave them a lecture. I don't buy the meme of high school kids serving life over a single joint, unless law enforcement in other jurisdictions is bat guano crazy. Nationally, though, I believe the "War on Drugs" is a self-perpetuating problem and not much of a a solution to anything, which is why I believe we must nip the "War on Guns" in the bud and not go any further down that path. (There is no long term career in government for real problem solving, but perpetuate a problem and you got a life-time sine cura position.)




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*(I remember 1999 as the year we had no murders county-wide (pop. ~150,000) and a NYC magazine editor who was in town on business the weekend of a gun show editorialized in the newspaper he would grandly allow us to keep our rifles and shotguns if we would allow adoption of federal Sullivan Law restrictions on our handguns.) Published locally as "A Northerner's fear and loathing in Kingsport": John R. MacArthur, "My compromise in the gun debate", The Providence Journal, July 5, 2000, (c) 1999 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. [old link dead; live link:]
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-63162862.html

Revisit the HIPPA Act that prevents doctors from sharing information about their patients. The great majority of the recent high profile mass murderers have been young people that have been able to pass a background check to legally buy guns despite the fact that they were total loons. All had a history of doctor care, psychotropic drugs and making threats.

Reckless people likely to do violence are also likely to do drugs

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And conversely, there are a large number of "drug users" who never commit a single violent act and break no other laws than those dealing with the possession of said drugs. Just because your statement is true doesn't make mine false. The vast majority of marijuana smokers I believe fall into this category. There are millions of them out there, and they aren't all hardened criminals. Look at areas that have legalized it recently....while not a lot of data to go on at this point, so far, crime rates are DOWN in Colorado.

Rather than punish people based on the odd premise that the drugs might make them do something stupid(which, to me, seem to be the basis of drug laws in this country), I say we punish them severely for committing the stupid act. Of course, I don't expect everyone to see things that way, but it is how I personally view things. I think punishing people because they MIGHT do something bad if they ingest the substance in their possession is a rather odd premise, but one that' commonplace today, at least from my point of view. I feel the War on Drugs is a MONUMENTAL waste of time that largely has resulted in more drugs, of greater purity, being available at lower prices. That isn't the kind of result I'd expect from the billions of dollars we throw at the issue. Its time for another approach, because doing the same thing a million times over expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

None of the above.

Well first, violence is on the decrease and has been for a very long time, so whatever we're doing now seems to be working. We're not going to wake up one day to find violence a thing of the past its going to be a process, the fact that it decreases every year is a very very good sign.

The mass shootings that always prompt questions like this are actually very rare anomalies. In a country of over 300 million people someones going to eventually snap and no amount of money spent on mental health is going to fix that. Its the scariest form of violence because its random and therefore can happen to anyone at anytime. But worrying about it is kinda akin to someone who's about to get hit by a hurricane worrying about being struck by lightning, sure it can happen and would be very bad, but you're more likely to die from the winds and flooding.

What more can we do? I'd like to see the justice system place a greater emphasis on reform. Locking up violent people in the same building for large chunks of their life and then re-releasing them into society where I might add that they'll have a very difficult time finding a legitimate job with their felon status is clearly not working.

P.S. Please don't try to take away my violent video games and movies, they might not be your thing, but I like em. Associating them with mass shooters is mistaking correlation for causation, given that they're usually young males they will disproportionately in regards to society as a whole be consumers of such material. But when you take males in their age range they are no more or less likely to consume violent media.

None of the above. That's actually pretty amazing. There are many real, workable, and much talked about things we could do and you didn't mention one of them. Kudos?

#1: Abolish the "War on Drugs"

A large percentage of the the victim violence in thr USA today is a direct result of prohibition. Alcohol prohibition caused a massive surge in violence, and drug prohibition continued that.

#2: Further reduce systemic discrimination. To quote one of the greatest Americans in U.S. history: "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

#3: Properly classify "violence" in statistics. Suicide is not violence. It may be a mental health issue, it may be self actualization, but it isn't the same as shooting up a theater. Which brings us to #4....

#4: Bring firearms education, including actual shooting of real firearms, into public education. Build 1 shooting range lane per 1000 people in the US, with a goal of having a safe place to shoot within 20 minutes travel of everyone in the USA. Why? Because making firearms taboo, and mysterious, encourages fixation by individuals with mental illness. This is especially true when you add movie conventions that have people flying across rooms when struck by pistol bullets. I have talked to people who had obvious mental illness who believed that the guns in their video games were real, and that guns really could knock a person across a room, and so on. Remove the mysteries, and give people opportunities for safe shooting.

Those would eliminate over 30,000 violent deaths per year in the US...not just firearms deaths either.

Op, why do all your options add further regulation and or restriction to the 2a?

IMO, post #11 is the correct answer. Lawmakers cannot legislate away crime. Gun control is about control not prevention of crime. Even if all guns were outlawed today and 100% of them, all of them, taken from the good and bad, were confiscated tomorrow, people would figure out a way to kill and hurt. Even on a mass scale. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a bomb that would do an equal or greater amount of destruction and death. A knife requires more physical effort than a gun to use but can be as equally effective as a gun. These are just a couple things a person can use to inflict a lot of casualties or pain and suffering. Violence is not in an object. It is in the hearts and minds of people and NO amount of legislation can take that away.

The United States of America was founded as a free country. More control just takes us further away from the principals our great nation was founded on.

All those options suck.

You should add: LEGALIZE THE CONSTITUTION.
Funny how my area where people have guns coming out the ears and some of the loosest gun laws we have very little violent crime. We're all armed to the teeth and feel quite safe.

Kynoch said:

What should really be done about gun violence in the US?

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Forbid any California representatives in the House or Senate from voting on anything firearms related.

Impeach certain Cali residents such as Feinstein for treason

Teach our children to be responsible, moral people. Also teach them how to protect themselves, because there are too many out there that won't do the above.

First off accept that someone who is wanting to KILL people is going to ignore or find ways around any laws passed.

Really ACCEPT this as a fact. Accept that we can NOT legislate morals and quite trying.

Second, judgment is not anywhere near swift enough. You should not sit for 2-3 years waiting for trial.

Third we have the technology to build a device that would let us tell if someone was in fact lying, or telling the truth as they know/saw it. Put that in place in every courtroom in the land, and put the defendant on the stand. Failure to do so, or taking the 5th would be automatic conviction.

It all comes down to did you do the action? (pull the trigger, use the knife, throw the rock, throw that punch) or not. Reason's why do not mitigate the fact that you did (or did not)

When it comes to punishment, I am a firm believer in making it fit the crime.
They should suffer what their victims suffered. Again, and again, and again.

If you didn't do it, you have nothing to fear, no reason not to tell all.

Ghosth said:

taking the 5th would be automatic conviction.

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Just wipe your butt with the Constitution, why not?

Ghosth said:

It all comes down to did you do the action? (pull the trigger, use the knife, throw the rock, throw that punch) or not. Reason's why do not mitigate the fact that you did (or did not)

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Good-bye self defense.

Prison terms for violent offenders should be short, real short, followed by burial.